Travel and Culture Blogger Stationed in San Diego

I’m going to admit something embarrassing: Up until this year, I have never watched Seinfeld. Every time Seinfeld came on television in the 90s, I would change the channel as quickly as if I had just accidentally stumbled upon a network that consistently showed dentists drilling into teeth without putting their patients on novocaine. For whatever reason, I hated the show, and I would much rather watch reruns of The Simpsons or anything on Nickelodeon (Doug, Rugrats, All That) or reruns of Nick at Nite shows. Perhaps I was too young; perhaps I didn’t understand the jokes; perhaps Jerry’s voice just annoyed the crap out of me. Whatever it was, I never really watched an entire episode of Seinfeld.

Years later, I fell in love with Curb Your Enthusiasm, and through that show, I began to grow an superficial interest in Seinfeld. (Larry David is hilarious and awkward and brilliant.) Plus, I had a neighbor in Miami who just loved Seinfeld. He used to quote lines to me all the time, and they would float over my head. For instance, we were out to lunch one day, and I pulled out my wallet. Back then–this was when I was in graduate school–I had a gigantic, over-stuffed wallet. It was packed with papers, cards, business cards–pretty much everything but money– and I began to think it was hurting my back. When I put the wallet on the table to ask him what he thought, he burst out laughing and called it the Constanza wallet. Of course, I didn’t catch the reference.

The Constanza Wallet

Perhaps it was an interest in Larry David, perhaps it was a frustration with not being able to catch cultural references, but whatever it was, I knew I had to watch all nine seasons of Seinfeld in 2016. Over the last several months, I have embarked on a mission to watch every episode in chronological order. I have vowed to begin to understand references, and I have sworn that no matter how annoyed I became with Jerry’s voice, I would get through the series. Strangely, as an adult, I found that I loved the show–how can you not?–and I wanted to share with you some of the aspects I had been missing out on. Some of this might be a recap for you; some of it might be new. But this is what I learned from watching all nine seasons of Seinfeld.

1. George Constanza Gets Extremely Dark

In the episode “The Invitations,” George Constanza’s fiance dies after licking a bunch of envelopes from cheap wedding invitations that George, of course, buys. The death was shocking, and it was amazing how dark George became in the episode. We saw himself as a man who was heading into a marriage that he didn’t want to partake in but couldn’t stop from happening, and when his fiance died, he almost rejoiced–or at least remained completely indifferent–to the death of a woman he was about to spend the rest of his life with until the end of eternity. This episode didn’t seem like it came from a mainstream television show; it seemed like it originated from the mind of a brilliant French short-story writer who wanted to pursue the themes of love and existentialism. What was most shocking was the reaction that all of the actors had when they heard she died. They all just went and had some coffee.

“I couldn’t figure out how to play off of her,” [Jason Alexander] said in a “Howard Stern Show” interview Thursday. “Her instincts for doing a scene, where the comedy was, and mine, were always misfiring. She would do something, and I would go, ‘OK, I see what she’s going to do, I’ll adjust to her.’ And then it would change.”

2. Elaine Benes Was Sex in the City

For a mainstream show on a national network, Elaine Benes’ character was truly a progressive woman. Of course, she was famously a part of the masterbation game–where the four friends wanted to see who would crack first–but she was also unashamed about her life that wasn’t traditional in terms of marriage, monogamy, or career. She was clearly ahead of her time–or perhaps our world was too far behind–for mainstream television. Elaine contrasted to many of the other female characters at the time, and Brigit Katz at the New York Times wrote the following:

“While Elaine’s TV contemporaries—say, for example, Rachel from Friends—were getting bogged down in humdrum will-they/won’t-they romance narratives, Elaine was cycling through partners almost as often and usually as dispassionately as her BFF Jerry.”

I never really thought much about Elaine before watching the show, but after learning about who she was, how independent she was, how real she was, I couldn’t help but find her to be, perhaps, my favorite character on the show. I also started watching Veep before Seinfeld, and I have come to think of Julia Louis Dreyfus as one of the funniest comedians–and skilled actors–out today.

3. These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty

If you said that line (“These Pretzels are Making me Thirsty”) before I started watching Seinfeld, then I would have stared at you and waited for context, for reasoning, for logic. The entire gag would have flown over my head like a humming bird moving onto the next flower. But now I understand. In one of the funniest moments on the show (at least for me), Kramer reveals that he has a line in a Woody Allen movie, and it’s “These pretzels are making me thirsty.” Each one of the crew give their take on how to say the line. Of course, George is in the midst of car-parking fiasco, and he turns the bit of dialogue into a moment that reveals his frustrations with life, love, and success, simply by the way he says the line.

From a perspective as an aspiring novelist, this scene spoke to me clearly about writing dialogue. It was all about inflection; it’s all about the way the character moves around the room; it’s all about how he runs toward the window at the cars below who are honking for him to get back to work and confront his failing and miserable life that translates into meaning. It’s a moment of brilliance, but it’s also a moment about meaning and language. What we say can change so drastically by the way we say it.

4. The Last Episode was Horrible

Seinfeld last episode

Out of all the seasons, I loved seven and eight the most, and I did think that season nine took a step back. It was still a good season, however, but the finale, well, was pretty terrible. I expected a great show like Seinfeld to end in a way that was spectacular. I expected there to be something incredibly hilarious, some twist of fate that brought two worlds together in a way that no one could have seen coming, but instead, the final episode was a recap, a walk-down-memory-lane as all the characters came back to serve as expert witnesses to testify how terrible Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine are as people.

Of course, everyone must have been wanting Jerry and Elaine to admit finally how in love they were with each other. (We almost had it on the plane.) The television audience must have been craving for them to embrace each other, look each other in their eyes deeply, and say our existence is better now that we’re together. Well, it didn’t happen, and the show ends with them all in prison. (Sorry for the spoiler alert.) While the last episode was pretty lame, I admire them for not giving into the pressure, to the idea, that life should only be seen as a epic voyage to love and marriage. Of course, my life has taken that route, and I’m grateful for it, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s lives have to be that way. There are other narratives to a personal journey, and there are other ways to live.

5. A World of References Have Been Opened

In the end, if I was going to write about all the different things that I learned from watching all nine seasons of Seinfeld, then this post would be so incredibly long, and I would be forced to spend more than a couple days writing this thing. But if I had to sum up what I learned in one final point, it’s that a world of culture almost opened up to me overnight. I now understand the puffy shirt and what my friend means when he makes fun of my overstuffed wallet. I understand what it really means when someone has an incredible desire for a calzone, and I, yes, finally understand the larger appeal of “No soup for you.” But ultimately, I was able to watch a series of actors so attuned with their characters, and that feels like it only comes once in a decade on t. I just feel bad it took me this long to realize how much I was missing.

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At the beginning of 2016, I read an incredible piece by Joanna Stern, a Wall Street Journal reporter, on why Snapchat was about to have a “Facebook” moment–a term she used to describe a social network when it reaches a massive audience and becomes a part of the collective conciousness–and she encouraged people 30 and over to join a network known for being used mainly by tweens. The article really struck a chord with me, because she offered the first real reason why I should join Snapchat. She said Facebook was for major life updates; Twitter was for keeping up with live events and news; and Shapchat, well, “is for bearing witness—telling stories in raw, often humorous, behind-the-scenes clips or messages.” As someone who has built a career and creative life on the ability to tell stories, I jumped at the idea of seeing Snapchat as a medium for my storytelling–a way for me to easily use videos and focus on sharing my personal journey in a new and innovative way…an almost extension of my blog.

Of course, I didn’t think that way at first. Like most people my age, I initially thought Snapchat was for dick-pics and bored tweens who wanted to send photos of their lunch like it was a freaking Joseph Sudek photo.

Joseph Sudek

I thought Snapchat was another form of social media that would pull me away from the real world and further apart from my own creative life. I thought it would further pull me out of the moment and into a matrix of likes and retweets, entangling my conciousness in a rabbit-hole obsession with my analytics. But I have actually found several reasons why joining Snapchat was a great idea, and I think every single person who has a smart phone should join the social platform, especially if you work in a creative field. See my reasons below.

4. Snapchat is Changing Storytelling

I work in a creative field and tell stories in many different forms–marketing, journalism, public relations, podcasts, blogs, and fiction–but I also tell stories in a social setting as well–stories at a bar to friends or just through social media. Using Twitter, Facebook, or even this blog is a form of storytelling. But Snapchat’s stories are unique in the sense that I can tell the story of my day through video and photos in a format that is easy, quick, and immediate. I have often tried to enter into video, but I have failed because I’m too big of a perfectionist. I want the video to be so top notch that I refuse to send it out into the world. But with Snapchat, I don’t have to worry about any of that. It’s all shot on your phone, so it’s raw and straight from the moment. I love that ability to share stories that don’t have to be carefully constructed or edited.

3. Snapchat Discover is the Zeitgeist

Original photo, Joseph Lapin, somewhere on the open road

If you’re in the creative world and you rely on staying up-to-date with trends and cutting-edge content, then Snapchat Discover is essential. When you’re creating content that is designed to interact with the largest amount of people or land publications at some of the best publications in the country, it’s important to have an understanding of the zeitgeist–the spirit of the times–and know what news is breaking and what trends are popping off. Of course, Snapchat is not the only tool I use to ensure I’m tapped into the zeitgeist (I’m an avid reader of the Wall Street Journal and other publications), but watching the WSJ, CNN, ESPN, and BuzzFeed in the discover section really helps keep me in the know as much as possible. If you don’t believe there is value to the snap stories from a creative and professional perspective, then let Bill Adair, Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University and the creator of PolitiFact, describe to you his experience with Snapchat:

After a week with Snapchat, I went back to the Times and the Post to see what I had missed. I found that the Discover providers had covered many of the same stories that got prominent play by the big papers. The Snapchat channels even had some good enterprise stories that explored politics and business news in some depth.

2. Stay Connected with Your Friends

I hate text messaging. It annoys me. I’m still the type of guy that would prefer to hop on a phone to talk with their friends, but I still have a hard time finding the energy or the time to jump on a call. I’m not entirely proud of my lack of effort toward my friends, but Snapchat bails me out. It’s so easy to send what you’re doing or a quick message to a friend you haven’t seen or heard from in a while. It’s an efficient and scalable way to maintain friendships with people, especially if you have moved around the country. For instance, I have a great buddy back home in Clinton, Massachusetts, and we’re not the type of guys to get on the phone and talk about our days. But almost every week, I receive a Snapchat from him, highlighting his new job site or what new trick his gigantic great dane figured out. Snapchat brings you into the room with your friend; it brings you into their day; it brings you closer than the carefully curated algorithm of Facebook.

1. Future of Broadcast Journalism

If you have ever seen the Snap Story “Good Luck America,” then you have seen the future of television and storytelling. The Snap Story is hosted by Peter Hamby, a former politics reporter for CNN and Snapchat’s head of news, and it exhibits how Snapchat is going to disrupt the very idea of how we watch “television,” and it provides us with news that is wired for the digital-media brain in a way that I don’t think I’ve experienced before. Of course, BuzzFeed started disrupting the story with the list and videos that are almost candy for the brain, but the way Hamby tells a complex story using cut aways, animation, and humor makes a lot of sense to my generation, and it feels like something that could have only come out of the Snapchat movement.

Follow me on Snapchat by taking a screenshot of the image above.

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In the May/June 2016 of the Huck, a London-based magazine that is “refusing to be civilised since 2006,” released their new Freaked Out Issue, and I had a profile appear within the issue on McKamey Manor, America’s most extreme haunted house. As you’ll see in the piece (order your copy), I drove out to Rancho Peñasquitos to talk with Russ McKamey and a group of actors who run McKamey Manor.

Before I went to visit the manor, I conducted some preliminary research, and the videos I saw of the haunt truly freaked me out. The videos showed Russ McKamey and his actors dunking their “guests” heads into toilet bowls, shaving their hair and making them eat it, and mentally torturing people to the point where they would break. If you’re brave enough (I’m not kidding; these videos are fucking crazy), then you can check out their YouTube Channel. In his videos, Russ McKamey seems like a madman–someone who was only interested in sadism and torture, but when I actually went and visited McKamey Manor, I was able to talk to Russ, get to know him, and understand him a bit more. The way I learned to see Russ was more as an artist whose medium was fear.

Please give the issue a read to learn more. In other news, I’m going to try start blogging once a week again, and I’m 90,000 words into my new novel. After I’m done with the draft, I’ll cut the crap out of it and slash scenes and rework them, but it’s really great to continue to make progress.

I have been down on Kanye West since his narcissistic antics turned him into the mad genius who seemed to put himself on the same platform as God, but after watching Kanye on Ellen, I changed my opinion about him a bit. If you have not seen Kanye on Ellen, then I suggest you watch the 8:00 minutes of entertainment below, but if you don’t have time for that, then let me sum it up for you. Kanye went on a rant, where he started reciting Rakim and talking about everything from fashion to Mark Zuckerberg to ending bullying. Ellen sat there quietly, allowing him to continue to rant, knowing very well that the video was about to be as viral as chicken pox in a third grade classroom. What I found was that what may seem like an absurd mad lib from a man who had lost his mind actually was quite beautiful and profound, and I wanted to try to share my interpretation of something he said about bullying.

Yes, some of the other headline grabbing quotes might catch someone’s attention, but what I found interesting was that Kanye was trying to say that he called the CEO of Payless, a shoe store that is typically known for cheaper shoes. It’s clearly not where “cool” kids shop; in fact, I remember being made fun of for wearing shoes that came from Payless and not the incredibly expensive Reebok “Pumps.”

This seemingly random fact occurred during the rant about how Kanye wanted to change the world, and at first, it seemed really out-of-place. I asked myself: “Why the hell is he talking about Payless right now?” From what I understood, Kanye was trying to draw an analogy between his music and his clothing, specifically his shoes. He was setting up that his music and his shoes come from the same skill set, the same voice, and there is only one art for him that transcends all of his medium. So, the shoes and the clothing he makes should be as artistic as his music.

I don’t know anything about his clothing, and I’m not a fashion blogger, but I know he is successful and that people see Kanye as an influence. The next part is what struck me: He mentioned that he wanted to call Payless and talk to the CEO because he wanted to impart all the wisdom he learned from high fashion and apply it to the cheaper shoe store. He was saying that he wanted to end bullying though it.

Huh?

Well, clearly that seems like it’s from left field, but when you think about it, it’s not actually that bizarre. My interpretation of the Kanye rant, specifically when it comes to bullying, is that by using style and his brand to create an affordable shoe, then he’ll be putting children on an equal playing field. While it could still be lost in translation, Kanye is saying that clothing and brands can be made to equalize and eliminate differences.

So, I think there are a lot of ways to poke holes in his statement. By calling for uniformity in style, then why not just call it a uniform? If you give everyone an affordable shoe, then won’t it lose its mystique and go out of style? If you give a kid an affordable shoe with mass appeal, then won’t the differences in hats and other products still continue to create separation?

There are a lot of holes in what Kanye was saying, but I was taking him so literally. It was almost as if he was trying to figure out a way to break up social structures through style and shoes, which has often been unintentionally and intentionally used as a means of class separation. I didn’t think that he was saying that if we can just change people’s shoes then we can end bullying. But I do think he was simply saying the it’s possible to use influence and fashion in a way to make more people feel included and a part of a community, rather than excluding so many. Well, I hope he puts his money where his mouth is instead of asking Zuckerberg for his.

In the end, Kanye could be oversimplifying bullying, ignoring the psychological condition of the bully and the larger complexities, but I don’t think it’s so crazy to suggest that affordable fashion and style can create more equality in education. So I guess what I’m trying to say is before you judge Kanye’s “rant,” keep in mind that the smartest person in Shakespeare’s plays was often the fool–the clown who seemed to be saying the most off-the-wall comments but who was actually speaking with a great deal of truth.

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On Friday night, Heron and I joined our family in the Willamette Valley outside of Portland, Oregon, where we drank so many pinot noir that I felt like my blood had literally been turned into wine. It was my first time in the valley, and I was surprised to find that it reminded me so much of my home in New England. In the photo above, you can see the thick fog that hugged the grape vines at Domaine Serene, a fantastic winery with some earthy and complex pinots and a dry rose. It rained the entire weekend, but I enjoyed it. The fog enveloped the entire scene, and it forced me to examine what was right in front of me, and I was in the moment and focused on family and friends. Below you will find some of the photos I took in the Willamette Valley to highlight some of the places we drank and ate.

What struck me about the Willamette Valley is how green it is. My brother-in-law went on a run, and he came back and said he felt like he just ran through a jungle. The views are lush, and the rain warm.

We drank a lot of wine, but we did something that I never did before: an olive oil tasting. It wasn’t my idea, and we almost went to a local brewery instead, but I was so glad that I stuck around for the olive oil tour at the Oregon Olive Mill at Red Ridge. We tried olive oil in official tasters, and what I learned was that when tasting olive oil there is a peppery, almost spicy taste at the finish. I had one olive oil that hit me like I had just ingested a bunch of pepper. We had a lunch after the olive oil tour, and everything was drenched in olive oil, including coconut ice cream with a bit of sea salt.

The rose above was taken on the grounds. Someone who is a part of my family pointed out the rose above and said: “Take a photo of that rose. It’s Mother Nature at her finest.” Hope I did it justice.

Final shot is of a hazelnut. At the bottom of the olive plants, they use hazelnut shells as ground cover.

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In early November, 2015, Heron and I went to Yosemite National Park. We almost didn’t go, because we were worried about the cold weather and the snow, but I’m so glad that we just put the fear and uncertainty out of our mind and drove from San Diego to Yosemite. Below you will see five of my best nature photos from Yosemite.

1.When the Trees are Bigger than You Could Imagine

2. Running to Catch the Last Glimpse of Light on Half Dome

3. Using a Neutral Density Filter on Vernal Falls

4. Water on the Rocks

5. Half Dome During the Day

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The other day I visited White Oak, one of the world’s premier wildlife conservation facilities, which is 30 miles north of Jacksonville, Florida. I was able to visit such an incredible facility that spans 10,000 acres because of my sister (I hate to write the word “in-law” [really diminishes the idea of family, no?]) and future brother (insert same frustrations here) work there. They took us around White Oak, telling us about how rhinoceros are unfairly poached for their horns and the difficulty of breeding birds in captivity. What’s most enthralling is how much space each animal has to roam, and I was able to take some photos of these cute animals on a conservation. See my eight photos below.